Jay Pharoah on Success: ‘Kick Your Family Out of the Audience’

Jay Pharoah is a repertory player on NBC's Saturday Night Live, where he's best known for his celebrity impressions, including President Barack Obama, Will Smith, and Kanye West. As part of our Better Man Project series, he shares what he learned about success from his father.

This isn't a well known fact, but I used to be 70 pounds heavier when I was 17. I also wasn't doing very well in school. I had like a 2.4 grade average.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

My last year, I just decided I had to do something about it. I looked in the mirror and I hated myself. I was depressed. So I decided it was time to make a change, time to be a man.

It was just straight up focus and drive. I went from 250 to like 175 in three and a half, four months. And then I ended up graduating with honors. I went from a 2.4 to a 3.06 in a year.

It's funny how those two are related. I don't want to say that if you lose weight, you'll get smarter but . . . well, it worked for me.

You want to know what changed everything for me? One little piece of advice. I first heard it from a comedian. His name was Tommy . . . um . . . god dang it, I’m bad with last names. Tommy looked like Woody from Toy Story. He was tall, thin, and white.

When I was seventeen and not feeling all that good about myself, he told me this: “Don’t be afraid to fail.”

That’s it. That’s all he said.

I followed his advice, and I wound up on Saturday Night Live, doing an impression of the President.

Sure, there’s more to it. You’ve got to know how to hustle. I got a lot of inspiration from my parents. My father was definitely a hustler. With six kids in the house, you always got to be hustling.

And my mom, she’s got sick work ethic. She’s the boss of a lot of people and worked her ass off to get there. She came from the projects. She came from deep in the hood, near Brooklyn. And to go from that to being the boss of bosses is insane.

I am the product of hustlers who taught me how to do it. They gave me a hustler’s ambition. Not a bad thing to get from your parents.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

But hustling only gets you so far. You have to trust yourself. And you have to be ready to fall on your face, and be okay when it happens.

My dad put me in a talent competition when I was sixteen. He told me, the guy with the most laughter wins, so you have to bring all your people to the show.

(For more ideas on how you can become a better father every day—as well as thousands of other tips on everything from health, nutrition and sex—pick up The Better Man Project, the new book from the Editor in Chief of Men's Health.)

And you know black people, we roll deep. It’d be like 20 of my family members in the club. I won every competition.

But you can only ride on that for so long. I stopped inviting my dad to the clubs. Because I had to do it on my own, you know?

My family has always supported me a thousand percent. My sister once sold her jewelry so I could pay for gas money to get up to New York for a show. And that’s amazing. But you get too much of that, you start depending on it.

That’s what it comes down to. You have to get out there without a safety net. You can’t be afraid of failure. Because you know failure is in the cards. It could happen to you. It happens to you every day. But you keep plugging and plugging and plugging. Until you don’t fail as much anymore.

When I went out on my own, without my family, pretty soon the audiences were laughing. Not because I was related to them, but because I was funny. And when that happened, I told my dad, “Alright, you can come back now.”

Any time you accomplish something great, it’s a crash or fly moment. The stakes are that high.

A crash or fly moment got me to SNL. It got me into the clubs. It even got me to get better grades and to drop all those pounds in high school.

You realize that you’re in a moment where you could crash or fly, and you’re like, “I’m ready for whatever happens.”

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Men's Health participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.